Recording Venue: Code Generation 2008 Guest(s):Eelco VisserHost(s): Laurence In this episode we’re talking to Eelco Visser about parsing text. We start at the basics – what is parsing? – covering classic tools such as Yacc and classic parsing approaches such as LALR before examining how more recent approaches such as scannerless parsing can make parsing easier and enable previously impractical use cases.

I agree that Laurence did a great job of steering the interview (and also, of making sure than everything was explained as they went along). Having two different accents on the interview seemed to work well too.

I have been wondering since the Converge interview what kind of parser Converge used (he named it but I didn’t catch it) -aha an “Earley” parser then. Chuckled as I heard Laurence debating parsing speed vs ease of use whilst pretending to be neutral on the issue

If I keep listening, I might find out why Converge needed a new language (as opposed to being say, Python based).